Nevertheless, his mind wandered to the pallid scullery maid who still worked for him. Whenever he thought of her, he thought of her hair—a pale, lightless blond. While she once may have been called willowy, she now was wiry, her hands reddened from years of work. His mother ran her household with compassion, but, on certain people, no matter how benevolent the conditions, the labor still aged them quickly. She had once been a fair-looking girl, no beauty like Olivia, but pretty in a pale, sly kind of way. But it had been years since he had heard anyone describe her in such a fashion.
“Tell me why you suspect her.”
“I only tell you this now in order to explain,” she said, once more not meeting his gaze. “But she was in love with you. She idolized you. When you left that first note for me, I half resisted your advances because of her—even when I was half in love with you myself. Because while I admired you, as all the girls below stairs did, Astrid had a full-blown calf love for you. Everyone knew it. You would pass her in the corridor and she would hardly be able to talk about anything else for a week. When she found out about our relationship, I was surprised she wasn’t crueler to me, given her infatuation.”
“I had no idea.” It had never occurred to Montaigne that any of the servant girls in his house thought of him as anything remarkable. He had grown up, in a fashion, with many of them and they appeared to him as fixtures as unremarkable and familiar as the furniture of the place or his own family. Until Olivia, he had never given them any thought.
“Yes,” Olivia said, “Since she still works for you, I beg you not to do or say anything to her. It wouldn’t be fair. If she did write that note, she must have done it out of terrible bitterness. And I would not have her suffer now for what she did as a girl.”
“Do you think she would have been able to do it? To copy my hand?”
“Yes,” Olivia nodded. “She used to collect scraps of your handwriting from the waste bin, I remember. Little things that you had thrown away. We would catch her mooning over them, Hannah and I, and Hannah would tease her. And she had a way, back then at least, with artful things. When the housekeeper needed place cards for the guests at table, she would always do them.”
He nodded, dimly aware that, at some point, he had been told that the handiwork on certain pieces of such finery had been done by Astrid.
Still, ten guineas, as he well knew from the past thirteen years, was too much money for a servant to spend on a petty rivalry.
“How would Astrid have had the ten guineas? It is too much for a maid to give away.”
Olivia nodded. “That is what I thought at first, too. But then I remembered that Astrid had saved up nearly twice that amount. She was very frugal—she was known for it. Her parents had helped her, too, seeing it as a kind of dowry for her. And she was so besotted with you. Any girl of that age, and especially Astrid as she was then, might behave the same.”
Montaigne sighed. He had to admit that Astrid made a rather uninspiring target for his anger. Especially given how meek and unassuming she had become in recent years. If she had been the means of separating him and Olivia, life certainly hadn’t rewarded her for it. If he had been clearer with Olivia about his intentions, if he hadn’t been so foolish, then Astrid would have never been able to come between them.
“Of course. I will abide by your wishes. And I am sorry to say that I suspect life has not been kind to her. My mother would know better than me, but I believe she takes care of her father, who used to drive a hackney cab and has for some years been an invalid. I know she has never married.”
“I am sorry to hear it.” She sounded so genuine in her contrition for Astrid that it moved him—and made him resolve, finally, to not bring up the matter with his mother or Astrid herself.
“In the end, it does not matter. I will not blame Astrid for my own failings,” he said, exhaling. “It is a horrible waste that we have spent all of these years thinking so ill of the other. But we must accept it.”
“Yes,” she said, sounding uncertain.
“And I am not about to let the past stand in the way of what I want now.”
“No?” she said, her honey-brown eyes meeting his once again. Her expression looked oddly timid.
“No, Olivia,” he said, knowing it was time to say what he had wanted to utter from the moment she had reappeared in London.
“I want to marry you. Please, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Chapter Nineteen
The Earl ofMontaigne had insisted that she give him no answer.
“Do not answer me now,” he told her, “I want you to have time to think. To talk it over with Mrs. Mapperton, perhaps. I don’t want to be that fool in the letter, pressing you for a response.”
She had merely nodded, stunned, unable to utter a word, for some minutes. He left not long after his declaration. Before he left, however, he extracted from her a promise of a different sort and she had assented, wordlessly. She would come to his home and meet his family tomorrow morning. Olivia had agreed in a daze, hardly conceiving of what she agreed to, or the enormity of what it implied. To return to Carrington Place in such a fashion—not as a guest at a crush, but a prospective bride for tea—was more than she could, in that moment, fathom.
Once he was gone, she sat for at least a half an hour alone in the parlor, mulling over all that had happened. She had to admit the truth to herself. She was glad that he had insisted she think over his proposal before responding to him. Because, when the question had hung in the room between them, she struggled to bring her objections, the ways in which such a thing was impossible, to her lips. She felt perilously close to saying yes.
If he had just been himself, and not an earl, a peer of the realm, one of the most powerful and prominent men in England, she would have been unable to keep her acceptance from bubbling to the surface. But although everything else about him tempted her,thatone piece held her back. Doubtless, it was the reason why he had insisted that she think over his request, for all he made of not wanting to seem as pushy as Mr. Laurent. They both knew what commentary their engagement would incite—and he would not be able to stem it, for all of his power. The Downstairs Menace, marrying a woman born in a London orphanage, who had once worked in service? The scandal sheets would be vile.
And that was not even the worst of it, however, in Olivia’s estimation. Because the scandal sheets were nothing in comparison to having tobehis wife—not the wife in his bed, or the wife of his heart, but the wife that had to stand beside him in ballrooms and endure the scorn of theton. She would be the Countess of Montaigne, Lady Montaigne, and would have to attend to every duty that came with these titles. She knew little about running an aristocratic household outside of the hard labor that went into maintaining one. Since before she could remember, she had wanted a family of her own. But she had only coveted a warm hearth, a man who would make her feel cherished and secure and sated, children she could nurture—not society events and guest lists and menus.
Not to mention that she was still struggling to reconcile all that she had thought she had known about him with the truth. She had been so wrong, even though she could not blame herself for it. Once she had realized that he really hadn’t written the letter dismissing her, it had not been difficult to puzzle out that the culprit was Astrid. At first, she had not been able to get over the hurdle of the ten guineas—it was a huge amount of money for a serving girl to give away. But once she had remembered Astrid’s little dowry, it had all been clear.
And another fact made the ten guineas credible to her. Astrid might had been jealous and cruel in her comments to her, but Olivia sincerely believed that she was a decent soul at bottom. She had shared a room with her and Hannah for nearly two years. Astrid could have done many things, particularly after she discovered her relationship with Augustus, to make her life difficult. Such acts were committed from one serving girl to the next for far smaller offenses—for just the power it made a poor girl feel over another. She could have soaked her bedding so she had to sleep in cold, sodden sheets or filled her shoes with mud. But she never had done such a thing. In fact, she had always granted her small, grudging kindnesses, like leaving water for her in the basin or, on cold nights, getting a warm brick from the kitchens not just for herself and Hannah, but for Olivia, too. They had all had a base loyalty to each other due to their shared station that was subtle, almost invisible, if you didn’t know it was there. It was easy for her believe that Astrid would have felt guilty at the prospect of her going into the world with only a few shillings in her pocket. It would have been worth half her little “dowry” to get rid of Olivia guilt free. That Astrid would have had any appreciation of her or Augustus’s heartache could not be expected.
Augustus had suggested that she talk over his proposal with Eloisa. She knew it had been a good-natured suggestion. But he had clearly forgotten all about the engagement between his brother and Natasha—and Olivia could not bear to thrust her own dilemma on her friend amidst such a time.
